The steel in Orion’s chest thrummed. He could tell it had an armor-piercing enchantment, designed to slip through arcane wards and physical protections alike. It had bitten through his lab coat, his skin, and the delicate tissue of his left lung, missing the heart by half an inch.
If he hadn’t managed to turn at the very last moment, he would already have been dead. Even now, only his Body score was keeping him alive, and as he was not a martial class, that wouldn’t last long.
Every breath was a wet, bubbling rasp. Blood filled his throat. He stayed on his knees against the cold floor, his vision swimming with dark spots as his body went into shock.
Arcane Overlay flickered as the data streams broke into static, his mind failing to maintain the connection.
Garrick roared in anger, the sound sending a shockwave through the chamber. He no longer demanded an explanation, then lunged across the distance, swinging a decapitating blow aimed to relieve Verner of his head.
However, the traitor was not so easy to get rid of. He raised his left hand and traced a blindingly fast sigil, and a wall of hard light erupted into existence.
The stout steel blade hit the barrier, yet once more, the shield held, sending a gust through the room.
Verner grimaced, forced to redirect the shield to parry a blur of a thrust from Jordan, which allowed Garrick to use the recoil to spin, driving his steel-capped boot into Verner’s hip and draw an annoyed grunt.
Esmeralda, meanwhile, had melted from the shadows, seeking soft flesh with her rapier.
Verner summoned a flare of pure plasma to burn away her necrotic strike, the sheer heat blistering the paint from the railing.
"Why?" Jordan demanded, his voice cracking with grief and fury as he swung again, unleashing a wave of light that forced Verner to fall back, while Daus bled out behind him and Orion risked doing the same. "We trusted you!”
Verner, however, offered no answer. He ducked a searing torrent of draconic fire from Erethemor, weaving a complex deflection ward that sent the flames splashing harmlessly into the brass vats.
In fact, he fought in complete silence, his lips set in a thin, grim line. His true capabilities were staggering; his mana output alone dwarfed anything Orion had seen at that age. Even his mother couldn’t have boasted such might in her early twenties.
Yet Garrick, Jordan, and Erethemor were Extra Rankers, and Esmeralda was a vampire with far more experience than anyone else. They fought with a coordinated ferocity forged in the wastes, pressing the traitor from four angles.
The level discrepancy was vast, but sheer experience and bloodlust kept them from being instantly overpowered.
None of it really mattered, though. Orion coughed, and a spray of dark blood spattered his gloves.
He was trapped in a dying limbo. The enchanted dagger was plugging the hole in his lung and a severed artery. Pulling it out would bleed him out in seconds. Leaving it inside would keep its enchantments suppressing his natural recovery, slowly suffocating him as his lungs collapsed completely.
He had several vials of his mother's healing potions tucked into his belt. Asteria’s brews were potent, but they were not instant miracles. They needed time to circulate through the bloodstream and knit the tissue. If he pulled the blade, the arterial spray would drain his veins before the potion could take effect.
Yet he wasn’t ready to die. Not like this. He had to do something.
Orion fought through the agonizing fog of pain, searching for a solution. His healing spells were crude, rudimentary. He had always prioritized physics, spatial distortion, and destruction. Only recently had he begun adding utility spells to his repertoire, and none would serve him now.
Despite himself, his eyes drifted to the chaotic melee. Jordan’s broadsword glowed with blinding white light, striking Verner’s shields and sending out shockwaves with each impact.
Light mana. That’s it.
Orion had studied its properties extensively, though mostly for its refractive qualities and radiation potential. In its purest form, Light mana was the manifestation of vital energy. It was a hybrid frequency, a perfect coupling of electromagnetic radiation and cellular energy transfer, mimicking the function of Adenosine triphosphate in living tissue.
Because it contained the fundamental energy of life, it possessed inherent healing properties. Even a basic [Torchlight] spell could provide minor relief.
Advanced applications could accelerate mitosis, forcing the body to repair DNA and knit torn flesh in real time. He’d seen it happen again and again in the Sanctum and during the war.
What he needed to do was provoke a surge of lifeforce strong enough to keep his artery closed for at least ten seconds, the time it would take to drink the potion and for it to run its course.
Under normal conditions, he wouldn't risk experimenting with such forces, with himself as the test subject no less. But if he didn’t, he would die. There was no alternative.
Orion closed his eyes, ignoring the screech of metal and the roar of dragon fire. With effort, he drew a thin, ragged thread of mana from the sluggish Field, pulled it into his body, and began to calculate.
He needed to convert photonic energy directly into chemical bonds, thereby triggering rapid, localized cellular reproduction at the wound site.
To do that, he structured the quantum relationship for photon energy, coupling it to the Gibbs free energy equation for ATP hydrolysis: (E = n·hν ) (ΔG=ΔH−TΔS)
More importantly, he needed the photons’ energy to precisely offset the thermodynamic cost of cellular regeneration.
Slowly and carefully, despite the blood bubbling in his throat, he mapped his own chest, calculating the exact wavelength needed to stimulate the fibroblasts without triggering uncontrolled tumors.
It’d be the height of irony if he managed to repair the damage only to kill himself in the process.
Only when the math was flawless, when the equation balanced perfectly in his mind, did he channel the mana into the formula.
The spell sputtered and died, dissolving into a few weak golden sparks.
Orion gasped, coughing up more blood. The pain was blinding, making it hard to focus on anything, let alone hold the entire structure in his mind.
The equation was right. The physics were sound. But Light mana, in its pure form, was not gravity. It was not kinetic force or subatomic degradation. It was the energy of life, and life required more than cold, sterile Knowledge, at least in his current circumstances. It needed an anchor he couldn’t quite give it, slipping away as he was.
It requires belief.
Witches cast through their absolute faith in the goddess. Paladins cast through devotion to a higher cause. Orion had never believed in anything he couldn’t measure, weigh, or calculate. He trusted only the immutable laws of the universe, yet hadn’t he recently realized there was so much more than he could grasp?
He stared at his blood-soaked hands. The world was fading, the edges of his vision blurring into a soft, fuzzy gray. The sounds of the battle grew muffled.
Believe. Orion grit his teeth, using the taste of his blood to focus.
He could not pray to a god, for he didn’t believe, and he neither sought salvation from the stars nor from the earth, knowing it wouldn’t come. Still, he reached inward, finding the unyielding iron of his own ego, the sheer, stubborn will that had driven him to survive the coven, the Silverpeak ranges, the deep roads, and the wastes.
He believed in his intellect. He believed in his fundamental, irrefutable right to exist. He asserted his life against the void of the universe, demanding that his cells continue dividing and that his heart continue beating.
He poured that arrogant certainty into the equation.
There was no room for it. It should not have had any effect.
Yet the mana caught fire.
Gold light erupted from Orion’s chest, bright enough to cast stark shadows across the rusted catwalk. It was warm, almost as if he were back in the Sanctum’s gardens, enjoying the refreshing breeze and the scent of millennia-old trees.
With a grunt of effort, Orion managed to twist his arm so that his hand touched the hilt of Verner’s dagger.
He wrapped his fingers around the grip, bracing himself against the pain he knew was coming, and pulled.
The serrated edge scraped against his rib bone, and a white-hot spike followed, threatening to split his skull. Blood erupted from the open wound, a dark spray that painted the floor in even more crimson.
Pouring everything he had left into the action, Orion forced the Light mana directly into the gaping wound.
The spell took hold. Electromagnetic radiation forced a violent surge in ATP synthesis, and the torn edges of his lung hissed as the tissue knit together at unnatural speed. The severed artery clamped shut, the cells dividing and fusing under the force of his will. The healing was imperfect, leaving thick scar tissue beneath his skin, but it stopped the bleeding for the moment, and that was all he cared about.
He dropped the bloodstained dagger onto the floor. With trembling, slick fingers, he fumbled at his belt, drawing the small glass vial of his mother’s potion. He bit off the cork and spat it away, downing the thick, syrupy liquid in a single gulp.
If asked later, he was sure he wouldn’t be able to recall the exact taste, but at that moment, it was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted. It hit his stomach like a lit coal, spreading its heat through his veins.
The potion took effect, reinforcing the crude repairs he had made, soothing the inflamed tissue, and clearing his airways of blood.
For the first time in minutes, Orion took a deep, shuddering breath. The air reached the bottom of his lungs and hurt, sending a throbbing ache down his spine, but he was alive.
Once he was sure he wasn’t about to keel over, he looked around.
The battle still raged. Garrick was peppered with burns across his face and arms, yet he still swung his greatsword as if it were a mere toy.
Verner flowed around the blows, weaving a net of arcane traps that slowed Erethemor’s claws and forced the dragonkin to the ground. Esmeralda darted in, her rapier finding a gap in his guard and scoring a thin red line across his neck. Before she could capitalize on that victory and call upon the blood, Verner mage retaliated with a concussive blast of kinetic force that sent her slamming into the far wall.
Above them, on the gantry, Kethor was ignoring the duel entirely, as if it didn’t matter to him who won or lost.
He was tapping furiously on his tablet, his goggles reflecting the green light of the vats. The three remaining silver hounds were still frozen, their logic cores locked in an error state after the sudden deletion of their companion.
Orion assumed that Kethor was performing a manual reboot, bypassing the corrupted data loops to force the machines back into defensive protocol.
It wouldn’t be long before he succeeded. It was surprising it had taken him this long, though, admittedly, not much time had passed. It just felt like ages since they’d entered the chamber.
The rogue druid was still screaming endlessly, his soul-sap bleeding out to feed the hounds. As long as the man remained connected to the grid, Kethor would retain control of the invincible machines, and Daus—bleeding out near the railing—would be consumed by the failed [Overgrowth] and become even more fuel.
An idea struck him, and Orion picked up Verner’s bloody dagger from the floor.
He knew he could not cast another complex spell like [Black Hole]. His mind was fractured with pain, and his body felt as if it were packed with hot sand.
But he still understood physics and commanded gravity.
He pointed the bloody dagger toward the towering glass cylinder, forty feet across the open pit.
Once his vision cleared, Orion engaged the principles of [Gravity Step] but inverted the target. Instead of altering the gravitational potential energy around himself, he applied the spatial metric tensor solely to the dagger's mass.
He compressed local gravity behind the hilt, creating a momentary slope in spacetime, then threw.